Lockdowns have violated three core tenets of public health policy: prioritising the long term over the short, focussing on the totality of health outcomes and not just on one disease and weighing both the harms and the benefits of medical interventions in the balance of decision-making. Responding to the article by James Allan on 20 March requiring five tests before imposing lockdowns, one reader dismissed lockdown-critical articles in The Spectator Australia as ‘mindless right-wing claptrap unsupported by evidence and common sense’.